The Word cannot be spoken

March 26, 2007, 8:00 am; posted by
Filed under Articles, Mike J  | No Comments

Our priest exulted, “How wonderful His ways,”
then climbed his pulpit’s Calvary. The tide,
lit by the after-dawn had brimmed the bay’s
calm space, reflecting light on the roof inside.
What boy, by a choir-loft window, could resist
turning to look? A seal swam round a trawler
whose lantern-masts were moored above in mist,
and rippled sparkling water-lap down all her
salt-rust length. Past diesel pumps and dock.
the sun unpicked the nets by the fish-house door
as I watched the seal clamber on Pollock’s Rock.
The mist had almost dissolved and a green pour
of ocean swelled and turned by the harbour stair
while the priest struggled, explaining God’s design,
and the seal shook his watered quaff of hair,
slicked down for Sunday morning, just like mine.

~ Oliver Murray

I am a “struggling priest.” And so are most evangelicals, really.

“Struggling priests” try — usually unsuccessfully — to give words to that which cannot be expressed, only experienced. In Murray’s poem, the priest climbs into the pulpit to “explain God’s design.” And yet the little choir-boy begins to experience God’s design not through the sermon, but through the green pour of the ocean, the play of dawn upon the bay, a swimming seal, and the sights and sounds of people at work. In all this, the boy sees God’s design and thus knows it far more than he would after any didactic sermon. It must be experienced to be truly understood.

Don’t get me wrong. I am no hopeless romantic. I know that words are necessary to fully understanding the gospel. I treasure those who hammered out the core of the faith at Nicaea and other councils. I value those who write great works of scholarship to defend and promote the faith once delivered. I honor those who make their living with words today, through sermons and writing and even librarians who organize these countless scores of words we manage to produce. Heck, I even hope to be a person who uses words to God’s glory.

But we must confess that sometimes words imprison the Word. Sometimes, our words render the Word inaccessible. Sometimes, my struggling to explain God’s Word renders it harder for someone to truly understand the Word. Making it as accessible as possible, as plain as possible, sometimes turns it into something it’s not.

In the language of this poem, for every boy lucky enough to sit outside and watch fishermen, sea, and seals, there are hundreds of people who can see nothing but a struggling preacher and desperately try to make heads or tails of what he’s saying, but end up further from God than when they started.

More broadly, sometimes our struggle as evangelicals to effectively communicate the gospel ends up altering the gospel. Many think of evangelism as making a sort of “sales pitch” for the gospel, drawing heavily on wisdom from the corporate and marketing worlds in order to make the gospel easily understood and digested. While there is something laudable in those attempts, we have often failed to ask the question, “What does trying to ‘sell’ the gospel do to the gospel?” If, in the way we speak of the gospel, we lead others to think it is a transaction we make with Jesus, have we not diluted the call of the gospel to the point it’s no longer recognizable as the good news of Jesus?

Drawing up four spiritual laws and other formulae to “explain” the gospel may just have the opposite effect from what we want: they may just push people away from the good God of light-play and labor, of seals and seas.


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